A couple of weeks ago my college held a graduate symposium, and it was a broad-ranging and very interesting day, with presentations from computer science, psychology, physics, classics, and even a ‘three-minute thesis’ on lucid dreaming. A colleague of mine gave a talk entitled, ‘Telling time: time in the worlds’ languages’ (the theme was time – a linguists’ bounty!), in which he gave us a whistle-stop tour of languages with grammatically encoded aspect1, languages with three tenses (like English), with just two tenses (nonpast and past, or non-future and future), and with no tenses at all. Languages like Chinese varieties don’t have any grammatical inflection to indicate tense (like we have in English, by adding -ed to regular verbs in the past tense, for example).
Sir John Tenniel’s illustration of the Caterpillar for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
In the question time, various members of the audience voiced surprise at how this might be. How can speakers of languages without tenses talk about time? How on earth do they get along? The intuition here, nurtured by our own linguistic experience, is that the ambiguity of tenseless sentences would be unsurmountable. If someone hears a sentence like ‘John eat cake’, which could mean John eats cake, John will eat cake, John ate cake, John had eaten cake, and so on, how are they to know which meaning is intended?
This raises the question, just how rife is ambiguity in language? And is it all that terrible anyway? Of course, in fine rhetoric, technical writing, and especially legal language, there is good reason to avoid ambiguity. While in other corners of language, such as poetry, there is reason to embrace it:
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be
For the gentle wind does move
Silently invisibly
(William Blake, referenced by Grice, 1975)
In lexical semantics, we try to carefully distinguish ambiguity from polysemy and vagueness (although you can probably think of examples where they mesh).
Ambiguity occurs when a form has two (or more) meanings, e.g., He went to the bank to relax with some fishing / to sort out a mortgage. (So, strictly speaking, our Chinese example above is not a case of ambiguity in a technical sense, more underspecification.)
Polysemy refers to a single word with more than one sense, a cluster of related meanings. e.g., I buy the newspaper that your dad works at. (clue: product and institution)
Vagueness concerns borderline cases. How few hairs does a man have to have to count as bald? How tall does a ‘tall man’ have to be?
And when you start looking, ambiguity is all around you. Besides lexical ambiguity (some more examples include ‘run’, ‘port’, ‘rose’, ‘like’, ‘cleave’, ‘book’, and ‘light’), there’s syntactic ambiguity, where the structure of a sentence allows for more than one interpretation, of which some infamous examples are:
Visiting relatives can be boring.
The chicken is ready to eat.
And semantic scope ambiguity, like this:
Every Cambridge student has borrowed some books.
> every Cambridge student has borrowed some (or other) books
> there are some (particular) books that every Cambridge student has borrowed.
So it is beginning to look like (accidental) ambiguity may not be such a rare thing. But isn’t this a deficiency in our linguistic system? If hearers are constantly having to work out what speakers mean, isn’t that a lot of effort on their part? Well, I think that kind of worried response assumes that speakers and hearers are just like transmitters and decoders. Or, to put it another way, it follows the ‘mind as computer metaphor’ – programming languages do not contain ambiguity, after all. But that’s precisely because machines that parse code are rather different from sophisticated human minds that are able to make subtle and fast inferences about speakers’ intentions. (And, besides, this ambiguity doesn’t seem to have stopped us communicating pretty well so far).
Today I read an intriguing article by Piantadosi, Tily & Gibson which sets out two reasons why ambiguity is actually expected in a communicative system like language. Firstly, given that words and phrases occur in a context which is itself informative (the preceding discourse, the social and world context, the speaker and hearer’s background knowledge), disambiguating information encoded lexically could actually be redundant, and an efficient language will not convey redundant information. Secondly, they follow Zipfian principles that suggest that ambiguity may arise from a trade-off between ease of production (lazy speakers who want to say the minimum) and ease of comprehension (lazy hearers who want maximum clarity and minimum work of interpretation). But, importantly, the fact that it seems that production – articulation of utterances – seems to be ‘costly’ (whatever that means in terms of physical / psychological processes), while inference – interpreting potential ambiguity – seems to be relatively cheap, means that where an ‘easy’ word in terms of production has two distinct meanings that usually turn up in different contexts, this is an overall win for the linguistic system (compared to one ‘easy’ and one ‘hard’ word form for the two different meanings). Crucially, though, this relies on communicators who are adept at pragmatic inferences, as Grice and other pragmaticians have long proposed.
So coming back to our example of Chinese and other ‘poor’ languages without tense: besides other strategies they have to express temporality, like adverbs (today, yesterday, now, in the past etc), their speakers can safely assume that their hearers are able to make the necessary pragmatic inferences given the context to work out what the speakers intend to communicate, therefore avoiding ambiguity, and, perish the thought, miscommunication.
1 Aspect, roughly speaking, is how an event is viewed in relation to time. One common distinction is between perfective and imperfective, which is a bit like viewing an event from the outside as a complete whole (perfective) or zooming in on a part of it on the inside (imperfective). In English, this would be the difference between ‘John ate the cake’ and ‘John was eating the cake’. References
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In R. Stainton (Ed.), Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language (pp. 41–58). Broadview Press.
Piantadosi, S. T., Tily, H., & Gibson, E. (2012). The communicative function of ambiguity in language. Cognition, 122(3), 280–291.
An ambiguous question was originally published on CamLangSci
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